"Lots of metal bands had all got a little bit in a rut by the time this came out. People were quite bothered about how they looked. And NIrvana smashed it to pieces. They said music should be raw and powerful – great guitar riffs, good lyrics, great melodies. Nirvana were the ones. And Kurt Cobain was charismatic. A lot of musicians resented grunge, but I quite liked it – we needed it. Saxon never went grunge – we went more metal again in the 90s. We had really needed a rest, but we couldn’t have one, and we weren’t firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t ‘til the 90s that we got our shit together again. Nirvana resonates for me because of that. It took people by surprise, because it went so big so quickly. There’s a lot of menace and darkness in and it was heavier than what other people were doing at the time."

"I'd loved the previous albums but then Attack & Release came out and they'd worked with Danger Mouse, who is one of my favourite producers and was doing great stuff around then with Gorillaz and Martina Topley-Bird, and he'd done The Grey Album thing too, and I think Gnarls Barkley came just after this. Quite an unusual choice of producer for them, because they'd been doing quite hard stuff before that. Not rock rock, but y'know. It was just an amazing blend. Danger Mouse has got a real swing to the stuff he does, and he'd put a surrounding swing to it, combining two quite raw musicians - and an amazing vocalist - and it's just this incredible album. I've seen them a couple of times - and I think I built my expectation of them up too much - I mean, they were amazing, but I think I was expecting it to be the pinnacle of all gigs."

"These were the two albums that introduced me to jazz. I knew bits and bobs but my dad was not really interested in jazz, it was never played in the house. Never heard it much on the radio. Eventually a girlfriend of mine at the time, when I was at Manchester Polytechnic, she played the Art Tatum album because her father had the Art Tatum Group Masterpieces. It's a beautiful album, it's so beautifully recorded, it represents an era before Miles, it's like jazz before Kind of Blue, it has that feeling of being slightly more traditional. But at the same time you can see the seeds of modernity within the recording, the extraordinary dexterity of Art Tatum. And once again, the engineering on these jazz records at that time is quite brilliant. I still listen to this album in its entirety. I love Ben Webster's tone. There's something very sensual about this recording. Just a beautiful thing to listen to. Kind of Blue was next on the list of the albums that I bought. And what I love about Kind Of Blue is the completeness of it. You get such joy; in a way the CD was better, because you didn't have to get up and go over to the deck and turn it over to side two, you just played it all the way through. This has been an influence on me in my attitude towards the band, and being in a band, and having a band, and what I had to face as I went through the Simply Red process. Because I realised that jazz musicians and reggae musicians and soul musicians, they don't have this peculiar . . . and I think part of it's evolved from British music journalism, actually . . . this notion that these guys in the band have to be effectively married, and there's some kind of sin created if one of them leaves or someone else comes in; it's like a national scandal, and everybody's in trauma that somebody leaves. With Miles Davis' career, he cleverly and naturally evolved over a period of years, choosing some of the greatest musicians that ever walked on the face of the earth. That again is one of the great things about Kind Of Blue – the fact you have Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans and John Coltrane, and Miles Davis on the record, and I think it's Jimmy Cobb on drums, Paul Chambers on bass. When I emerged as the only writer of the songs in Simply Red, it dawned on me and my management that we didn't have to be like the Beatles, and that you could say, “If this isn't working out, find another musician that's got talent, just keep moving.” Because I had that problem: I didn't have my second guy. John had his Paul and Mick had his Keith and Bono had his Edge, and that didn't happen to me, there was nobody else writing. And so when I saw jazz and the fluidity of Miles Davis, I thought, what's wrong with that? If there's nobody else writing, then bring other people in as the thing evolves. One of my great musical memories and moments was being at the Grammy Awards in, I think it was 1987, and I was talking to a very pretty girl backstage, and Miles Davis walked by, and I just froze because I was so thrilled to be in the space of my great hero. Then he stopped, and turned round, and came up to me and went [an excellent impression of Davis's hissing rasp] “Simply Red, right?” And I nodded in silence. You know, I'd been on the dole for four years, I'd just become famous in a matter of months, and there I am at the Grammys and Miles Davis knows who I am. He said, “I love that album, Picture Book, man!” And then just strolled off to the toilets. I was left completely stunned. You know, that, one, he even knew who was – and that he liked my album. It was an incredible thrill. I've never forgotten it."

"I think that this is one of the best albums of all time. It's hard to talk about. I feel like that album is the Sgt Pepper's of my generation. It's a record that knits together a whole generation of music-lovers. The fact that it's separate and isolated is sort of poetic. My generation wasn't connected by a band; we didn't have a Beatles. We had our own bizarre little pockets of music, our own separate ways of listening and connecting. That record functions in the world unlike any other record. I've never seen anything like it. It is a religious record. People feel so fondly about it, in such a profound way. Beyond time and space, on different continents, at different parties, the name of that band will come up and you and stranger will grab each other's hands. There's not a whole lot of music that can do that. Something about that album and those songs created a deep thread of human connection through a lot of people. I think it's incredibly rare. I think all musicians inherently want to connect, because that's what music is. Music connects you, through this magical medium, to another human being. Listening to Neutral Milk Hotel and looking at the artwork for that record and listening to how it was made, and thinking about the mythology of the Elephant 6 collective, it's like Sgt Pepper's – you imagine that there's this magical world somewhere, with all these crazy musicians, living down the road from each other, banging on pots and pans and playing brass instruments, and you want to be there. You get to soak that magic up just by listening to the record. Brian [Viglione], the drummer in the Dresden Dolls, got to see Neutral Milk Hotel when they were touring that record. He was the one that turned me onto it. In the middle of the night, after our very first band rehearsal, he took me over to his house and said 'I can't believe you've never heard this record. We're not doing anything until we sit in the dark and listen to it from beginning to end.' That record was always really important to us."

"George Clinton is very important to us. In fact, George, Sly Stone, Miles Davis and Curtis Mayfield are all people we're inspired by and look up to. I'm lucky to have become friends with George. We played a show last year with his band in London and he's just an amazing guy. I remember getting this album, listening to it and thinking, "Free your mind and the rest will follow." It's free, psychedelic, sexualised funk. Also, there are incredible lyrics. George is a great lyricist, one of the best. On one track, George was told to play a guitar solo and imagine that he was just told that his mother had died. Funkadelic can go from real, emotional, plaintive with a song like 'Maggot Brain' to a big, acoustic funk track. The message from the band is that you can do anything. George had many great musicians in his band and he changed it around, you just never know who was going to play on the track. It always sounds like Funkadelic because of George's vision."

"One of the best blue-eyed soul voices ever. Famously he didn't do drugs in the '60s and made up for it in the '70s. My girlfriend gave me a book about how he recorded each album, it's incredibly detailed. For this record, he got a studio together in New York and got a load of musicians together to make the record. At no point did he play any of the session players any vocals – they heard bits of music but they had no clear picture of what the actual song would be like. He had a total vision and he didn't want to deviate from that with anyone else's opinion. People talk about records that go from jazz to prog to psych to vaudeville in one track and that's Todd. A proper studio head who could write hooks and songs in an almost Brill Building way. My favourite story about Todd is that he lives in Hawaii and one side of his house doesn't have a wall. He said about it, "Lots of things come in. Animals, super-fans, stalkers, the weather."

"My first memory of jamming with Mark Ronson was sitting and trying to figure out a song called 'You Know, You Know' from this album. We were just having a bit of fun, but we played that song for two hours straight. Of all the Mahavishnu records this is the least produced, there's only five of them if you include the violin player. This record really changed my life, it opened my brain musically. I found this through Bitches Brew [on which Mahavishnu Orchestra's John McGlaughlin plays guitar]. I'd read the Miles Davis autobiography Miles while I was in high school. I didn't know anything about his music, I'd just read the book because it was there, but it got me into listening to jazz, and once I'd started listening to Bitches Brew every day, that got me into listening to Mahavishnu. It was a direct line of following the breadcrumbs of who played on what album you get into all sorts of stuff, a spiderweb of musicians."

"This is a compilation of Zakir playing different concerts, and it blew my mind when I was 16. Its one of the albums I've listened to 1000 times. It's bizarre that that would be something I'd listen to so many times, because it's so sparse - there's only the tabla and occasionally one other instrument, but never more than two at any one time. I once got to see him play with John McLaughlin, they really opened up my whole understanding of rhythm. I felt like my brain was getting bigger, it felt like I was learning about music. It's probably the most sophisticated rhythm I've heard from any country at any time, but it's not show-offy and designed to impress you technically. It has so much soul, it's such passionate music. Some people can't stand listening to it, but it's one of those albums that I could be in a terrible state but still happy to hear it. It relaxes me. That album really opened me up to listening to Ali Farka Touré, Indian classical musicians and so much more."